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Monday, May 5, 2014

More Work for Mother

Throughout the 20th
century,households were transformed by
a new abundance of labor-saving devices, from washing machines to toaster
ovens, and processed goods that reduced housewives’ workloads, leaving them
free to learn trades and professions of their own and fully participate in the
modern world.But in the second decade
of the 21st century, American women are just aschore-taxed as ever, lamenting of the ‘second
shift’ that awaits them upon arriving home. Despite the many machines now
investing our homes, most of the work
still has to be done by hand, for Parkinson’s Law holds true there as well as
anywhereelse: work expands to fill the
time available for its completion. In More
Work for Mother, author Ruth Cowan demonstrates how gadgets and goods
created new work while eliminating others, and argues that women will not be
free from drudgery until housework is freed from the realm of ‘femininity’ to the
point that men won’t feel emasculated by laundry.

The devices and goods of the 19th
and 20th century – refrigerators, washing machines, microwaves,convenient bags of flour, even more convenient
no-bake cheesecake mixes, even more convenient
instant cereal --did indeed reduce a
lot of labor. In fact, for men they reduced virtually all household work.More Work
for Other opens with a history of housework. Although modern readers
mightbe aware that women’s traditional
role was in the home, men’s
traditional role was in the home, as well;prior to industrialism, men didn’t pack a lunch pail and disappear into
the country for a day at work. The home and the work of most families were
intimately connected,typically inseparable.
Women may have baked bread, but it was men who gathered and ground it;women may have washed clothes, but men
chopped the wood and let children lug in the water. But while men’s roles in the household largely
vanished, women found that work remained constant.The availability of affordable clothing
reduced the need for sewing and repairing, but increased the burden of laundry,
and standards of cleanliness climbed as the ability to clean increased. Laundry
and scrubbing agents meant that minor stains could no longer be tolerated,
necessitating near-daily cleaning regimens.And those new labor-saving devices were often fragile things, needing
frequent cleaning to avoid their works being gummed up. Additionally, for middle class or wealthier
women, the availability of do-it-yourself machines meant that retaining maids
and other servants was a sinful waste – never mind that doing it themselves
meant more hours of their own time spent doing the labor, regardless of
advertisers’ claims of quick ease-of-use. There were
options that might have truly revolutionized household chores –commercial kitchens with thrice-daily
delivery,commercial laundries,
cooperatives, apartment hotels – but most fell by the wayside, either because
of cultural imperatives or because of market forces.

Although not as sweeping as Susan Strasser's Never Done, what's lost in extensive narrative is replaced by more serious analysis and an abundance of good points made. Cowan notes, for instance, that the increase of standardized products destroyed easy class differences: while in the mid-19th century a street urchin and the scion of a wealthy businessman would look as different as night and day just judging from their clothes' cleanliness, today both could wear the same products, and the fact that vitually all homes have water and heating means that no one is denied the ability to shower every day. The interior of homes, too, are far closer than they once were; the absence of gadgets and electricity might have once marked a hovel, but these days not even campers will tolerate going without a refrigerator. Her driving point is that the fact that homes are now filled with gadgets and manufactured articles doesn't mean that homes are no longer productive; mothers are still 'producing' clean bathrooms, fed children, and presentable clothing. If the labor women perform was priced as though they were in the open market, people would never assume homemaking to be unproductive. Ultimately, Cowan believes women will be freed from drudgery only when we relax fanatic standards regarding cleanliness and the housework that remains is stripped, through cultural or technological means, of its traditionally female association so that men will pitch in more. If that argument, made in 1985, has lost some of its edge in a 21st century peopled by "Mr.Moms" , most of the work has not.